Acceptance

I had been waiting so long that the wine in my glass had almost turned into vinegar when I suddenly received the final acceptance letter from Technology in Society, indicating that the paper I have been working on since my very first semester at HUFS in 2011 is now in press with an Elsevier journal. With only little more than a week remaining in Korea, this of course brings a certain sense of closure, just like shipping all those boxes with books to Umeå.

Yesterday, I also finally found some time to read Stephen Eric Bronner’s new book Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia. Ever since taking his classes in the spring of 2008 at Rutgers, I have somehow carried much of his thinking with me and this new book was definitely a sight for sore eyes after reading all the policy stuff on climate change that I normally read.

Lapu-Lapu

If only for a couple of days, we are back in South-East Asia. When we left the region in February, I was struggling to put together a co-authored policy paper which is now in press with the SSCI-journal “Weather, Climate and Society”. Although I got one more paper accepted earlier this spring, it has still been pretty rough on the publishing front recently as I have been reminded both of my own limitations and how hard it is to challenge orthodoxies (in particular among those who insist that they do not have any and that their own views and values are only those of “science”).

Though we have been to Mount Pinatubo and Manila on Luzon in the past, this is our first trip south in the Philippines.  Some of my students joked about the fact that we were going to a resort on Mactan Island rather than somewhere more adventurous. As stereotypical as it sounds, I guess it is indeed true that preferences change when travelling with a baby. Plus, Shangri-La does serve up a wonderful molten chocolate cake to go with my product placement for Coffee D.N.A.